2008KBWCurated by Aurelio Andrighetto with a contribution by Claudia Bianchi.

The hermeneutical research of the meaning hidden in a visual text, the relationship of mutual interpretation between images and words, historical anachronism, the juxtaposition of varied subjects: they’re all explicit references to Aby Warburg’s work, which is the inspiration for this third desktop as well. The contributions have been gathered and arranged on “shelves” following Warburg’s rule of good neighbourhood and multiple collocation in different areas. Each contribution reverberates on the one which it is brought close to, each time in a different way, by analogy, contrast, contiguity. A mobile and complex system of relationships which forgoes the hypertextuality offered by the electronic means to pay homage to that physical and concrete theatre of ideas and memory which is the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, whose acronym (KBW) constitutes the title of this desktop.# 3 KBW is a tool for the research and discovery of novel relationships through which we can grasp similarities, contrasts and contiguities between ideas and materials that wouldn’t otherwise exhibit any mutual relationship. It is a way of exhibiting through multiple and changeble juxtapositions which activates thinking strategies, methods of analysis and reflection, occasions to compare and discuss, ideas for research.

Melvin Moti is interested in psychic phenomena which question the ordinary representation of time, like boxer Sugar Ray Robinson’s premonitory dream, by which he foresees the lethal blow he’s going to deliver his opponent Jimmy Doyle. The “instantaneous” photograph E.S.P. (K.O. Mortel), presented at the 5th Berlin Biennial, depicts the moment when Doyle falls in the light of a flash, hit by Robinson’s fist. The flash is, at the same time, the reporter’s, taking the photograph, and the one with which the image appears in Robinson’s dream, an instantaneous flash of light, with no temporal extension, a synchronic time for which present, past and future are indistinguishable.

Olaf Blanke has proved that it is possible to perceive an illusory and out-of-body perception of one’s own body during a performance / lecture at the 5th Berlin Biennial, at the invitation of the artist Melvin Moti. For # 3 KBW, in combination with a work by Moti, he has sent us his article “Out-of-body, out-of-time. Abnormal unity of body and self in space and time”.Olaf Blanke is Director of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience (LNCO) at Brain Mind Institute in Lausanne.

A text by Paola Mola about the use of words in the interpretation of images with ramifications of thoughts and a return to method. The author, art historian, has been curator of two exhibitions at Venice Guggenheim about Costantin Brancusi and Medardo Rosso.

A progressive representation of time obstructs the comprehension of what is contemporary, which is anachronistic (Agamben), untopical (Nietzsche), untimely (Barthes). As Walter Benjamin observed, the time of history doesn’t flow in a linear way and a glance at the past can reveal views of the future. On the contrary what is current is exhausted in the present, in the immediate consumption without any future or project.Marco Belpoliti (literary critic, narrator, essayist, Italo Calvino and Primo Levi scholar) makes a distinction between what is contemporary (“an interpolation of different times”) and what is current (“what is taking place”).

Melvin Moti is interested in psychic phenomena which question the ordinary representation of time, like boxer Sugar Ray Robinson’s premonitory dream, by which he foresees the lethal blow he’s going to deliver his opponent Jimmy Doyle. The “instantaneous” photograph E.S.P. (K.O. Mortel), presented at the 5th Berlin Biennial, depicts the moment when Doyle falls in the light of a flash, hit by Robinson’s fist. The flash is, at the same time, the reporter’s one, taking the photograph, and the one with which the image appears in Robinson’s dream. , an instantaneous flash of light, with no temporal extension, a synchronic time for which present, past and future are indistinguishable.

Architecture historian Joseph Rykwert tells in a video about his first hermeneutical experience. The video is an extract from a work by Joseph Rykwert and Dario Bellini entitled Here, maybe! Notes about the city, especially adapted for #3KBW.

An adaptation of Philip Corner and Manuel Zurria’s First Travels in the 3rd Millennium, for drones e flutes, especially projected for # 3 KBW. Traced in a graphic form, as a visual track, by Philip Corner on four sheets of paper during four corresponding journeys, the score has been subsequently executed by Manuel Zurria in close collaboration with the composer.Philip Corner, renowned American composer and artist has been member of historical groups like Fluxus, Judson Dance Theater, Gamelan Son of Lion. Manuel Zurria, flautist and composer, has worked with con Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Tom Johnson, Alvin Lucier, Gavin Bryars, Arvo Part.

Film images, when they rely on the hand and eye of a great director, often end up betraying what is being narrated, entrusting the mise-en-scène with the task of telling us what the director doesn’t say aloud . Revealing one of these cases is what Bruno Fornara (former member of the scientific selection committee at Venice Film Festival and editor of Cineforum magazine) intends to do in this short lesson in cinema hermeneutics. The video has been expressly realized for # 3 KBW.

A photographic series made up by shots freezed in the form of a photograph and torn from the narrative flow of what seems to be a film noir from the 1940s. Silent images which bar the way to words causing their reaction, generating hypotheses and conjectures, enquiries, investigations that can’t find their solution because their meaning lays hidden in the gap between images and words. For # 3 KBW Jorge Molder presents a still frame series.

A still frame series, and a text, from the video Is This Guilt in You Too? ( The Study of a Car in a Field) di Ryan Gander. A girl’s voice interprets the enigmatic images of a motionless car, surrounded by the snow, with a running engine. The words interpret the image in various ways but it remains wrapped up in mystery. For this issue of # 3 KBW Gander matches his still frame series to a series of sentences punctuated by pauses.

Melvin Moti combines art research and scientific curiosity to investigate the extrasensory perception of images and the cognitive structures which control their birth, bringing to light complex and subtle links with language. This is demonstrated by his 35mm film ESP, based on the book that aeronautical engineer J. W. Dunne wrote in 1927, where he told about his experiences of pre-cognitive dreams and espoused his theory about time perception. Symmetrical and specular relationship between Dunne’s technical, minute and precise descriptions, generated by fantastic visions, and the fantastic images created by a technological system of high-precision film shooting which stretches to 18 minutes the flash of rainbow-coloured light where the whole precognitive vision told by Dunne is concentrated.As in the E.S.P. (K.O. Mortel) photograph also in the E.S.P. film the instantaneous time which generates the image is a flashlight.

The Last Silent Movie, presented to the 5th Berlin Biennial, is an editing of stories, rhymes, evidence, lexical lists in extinct or extinguishing languages, projected on a black screen with English subtitles. A critic to Eurocentric culture which marginalizes and erases other cultures.The meaning suggested by the rhythm and strong phonetic inflexions of vocal recordings doesn’t exhaust itself in the translation subtitles. A conflict between writing and orality which rises a series of sociological and anthropological problems besides linguistic and semantic ones.

The lightness with which everything overlaps, interferes, interacts in a photograph of the Large Glass at the Centre Pompidou is taken by Elio Grazioli, author of the text which accompanies the photograph, as an emblem of what Marcel Duchamp did about his life, through and by his work.The body of the author can be just made out in the blurred photograph: it becomes in its turn light and transparent, becoming part of that “overall plan” where everything overlaps and interferes. Elio Grazioli’s photograph offers a “point of view” to reflect about juxtapositions and interferences between ideas and materials collected in #3 KBW.

A text by Paola Mola about the use of words in the interpretation of images with ramifications of thoughts and a return to method. The author, who is an art historian, has been curator of two exhibitions at Venice Guggenheim about Costantin Brancusi and Medardo Rosso.

In his Magneto performance at the 5th Berlin Biennial, Cezary Bodzianowski holds a three-dimensional U using it as a magnet to attract travellers getting out of Alexanderplatz station on the Berlin U-Bahn underground line.The letter U from U-Bahn, transformed into a magnet, leaves the universe of words to enter that of objects, but it doesn’t lose its value as a sign. Object which stands as a sign to be interpreted both on a visual and on a verbal basis.Bodzianowski constructs a living and amused rebus, tossing up signs and meanings like jugglers do with balls, plates, rings and clubs.

Jenny Magnusson explores novel relationships among the objects arranging them in an unusual way with a predominantly geometrical structure. A system of writing with concrete objects standing as signs which she typographically “lays out” on walls and against partitions. Rooms as chapters, walls and floors as pages on which displaying her signs, silent and intransitive as regards language and therefore enigmatic. A complex system of writing and reading objects which are valid as a sign to be interpreted in relation both to their hidden meaning and to the one hidden by the word which the image has in its turn provoked. This is the reason why her display can be assimilated to rebuses and early systems of marking and writing. The Moderna 3 photograph adds an enigmatic supplement to her installation, which was presented in 2006 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The adhesive strip which runs along the floor seems to raise to lean on the wall (reminiscent of Charles Ray’s Plank Piece I-II.

The Last Silent Movie, presented to the 5th Berlin Biennial, is an editing of stories, rhymes, evidence, lexical lists in extinct or extinguishing languages, projected on a black screen with English subtitles. A critic to Eurocentric culture which marginalizes and erases other cultures.The meaning suggested by the rhythm and strong phonetic inflexions of vocal recordings doesn’t exhaust itself in the translation subtitles. A conflict between writing and orality which rises a series of sociological and anthropological problems besides linguistic and semantic ones.

Mariella Bettineschi perforated a caption on an iron plate : senza titolo (untitled). Short circuit between the missing image and the caption which substitutes it. The perforation turns the caption into an untitled image, an image which proves paradoxically intransitive to the verbal declaration which turns it into an image.

The lightness with which everything overlaps, interferes, interacts in a photograph of the Large Glass at the Centre Pompidou is taken by Elio Grazioli, author of the text which accompanies the photograph, as an emblem of what Marcel Duchamp did about his life, through and by his work.The body of the author can be just made out in the blurred photograph: it becomes in its turn light and transparent, becoming part of that “overall plan” where everything overlaps and interferes. Elio Grazioli’s photograph offers a “point of view” to reflect about juxtapositions and interferences between ideas and materials collected in #3 KBW.

In his 1994 Porzione di manico asessuato (Portion of an asexual handle)Gianluca Codeghini applies stick-on labels to some vinyl records to hinder the reading of the audio track. The record-player needle, hampered by the stick-on label, swerves and slides while it's reading the track and repeats the text engraved on the records, politicians' speeches in one case, fairy tales in the other. The trace is indecipherable in its hidden portions, and this prevents an understanding of the text.A failure of hermeneutical interpretation which Codeghini radicalizes in this work as in many others of his.

An extract from the video installation City of eyes by Studio Azzurro has been adapted to the stairwell in the art school L.A.S. Felice Casorati in Novara during a laboratory with students coordinated by Paolo Rosa from Studio Azzurro together with the curator of #3 KBW. The students have interpreted and revised the original video installation project in order to adapt it to the building which houses the school.Some experiments have been carried out during the planning; among them a shooting of the video installation with a video camera level with the steps, to decipher the variation in light intensity of the image projected on the steps. It is not only the direction of the shot, selected and edited images which gives the work its psychological insight, but also the distribution of its luminous intensities.

Film images, when they rely on the hand and eye of a great director, often end up betraying what is being narrated, entrusting the task to tell us what the director doesn’t say aloud to the mise-en-scène. Revealing one of these cases is what Bruno Fornara (former member of the scientific selection committee at Venice Film Festival and editor of Cineforum magazine) intends to do in this short lesson in cinema hermeneutics. The video has been expressly realized for # 3 KBW.

An adaptation of Philip Corner and Manuel Zurria’s First Travels in the 3rd Millennium, for drones e flutes, especially projected for # 3 KBW. Traced in a graphic form, as a visual track, by Philip Corner on four sheets of paper during four corresponding journeys, the score has been subsequently executed by Manuel Zurria in close collaboration with the composer.Philip Corner, renowned American composer and artist has been member of historical groups like Fluxus, Judson Dance Theater, Gamelan Son of Lion. Manuel Zurria, flautist and composer, has worked with con Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Tom Johnson, Alvin Lucier, Gavin Bryars, Arvo Part.

In his 1994 Porzione di manico asessuato Gianluca Codeghini applies stick-on labels on some vinyl records to hinder the reading of the audio track. The record-player needle, hampered by the stick-on label, reads the track swerving, sliding, repeating the text engraved on the record. The trace is indecipherable in its hidden portions, and this prevents an understanding of the text.A failure of hermeneutical interpretation which Codeghini radicalizes in this one as in many others of his works.

Critical writing connects art not only to literature but also to knowledges which are communicated and understood through words. When critical writing is blended into curation and integrates its processes, the connections which writing makes visible become evident in exhibition curation as well. The final outcome of curation integrated by (critical) writing is not the simple exhibition of works but of structured and complex relationships. The exhibition will thus be the form through which such relationships are made visible.Five tables at MLAC explores the possibility of this form, rearranging the materials and ideas assembled in #3 KBW. The reassembling on tables at MLAC will take place non-stop from 6th to 24th April. A marathon looking for a form which is at the same time, as Malcolm McLaren writes when he refers to his musical pieces, meaningless and meaningful.

The musical pieces in SHALLOW 1-21 (Malcolm McLaren’s musical films) are deliberately non-narrative. They are meaningless, and meaningful. They are shallow experiences, yet deep. While searching for a musical atmosphere McLaren draws our attention to a culture of surface and form which expresses itself precisely in music, cinema, art, design, show business, fashion, in a system of production and consumption of culture which finds its roots in Pop. This is why the rhythmical urge and the atmosphere in SHALLOW 9 are everything McLaren wants. They are what suffices to mean without there necessarily being a meaning. In his letter McLaren explains how he sculpts his musical pieces using the cut-up technique to assemble materials coming from the archives of Pop culture but also from other contexts, which are geographically and historically far away from one another. That is to say he links the cut-up technique to the fact of experiencing one’s time while going through different times, a fact which characterizes contemporaneity; a contemporaneity that is, in this instance, lived as a rhythmical and atmospheric, hence superficial, effect. In this respect the detail about how he put together the images in SHALLOW 9 is interesting: he did it while imagining a musical rhythm, the rhythm of what was once "outlaw music". Rhythm has an ambiguity thanks to which, as Nietzsche writes about Wagner’s music, it’s not known anymore, it doesn’t have to be known if something is head or tail. Rhythm is a coming back, to the initial cue, while the musical piece is going on along the time of its performance. For this reason McLaren’s music and films, which are in time, have a hypnotic, sometimes urgent and frantic, rhythm, which stuns us while it disrupts the linear and progressive representation of time. In a non-linear representation of time (and history) effects can precede causes instead of following them, causing fortuitous and unforeseen events that we refer to chance. It’s the fortuitousness with which the music and the films, made separately, have been put together instinctively chosen in a matter of minutes, generating unexpected yet extraordinary rhythmical and atmospheric results. The absence of linearity in McLaren’s cut-ups is also the one which characterizes our experience of contemporaneity.

Two works have been associated to Malcolm McLaren’s contribution: Untitled 290, a work by Roberto Crippa, sound artist who’s taking part in 5 tables at MLAC with his proposal, an interview to writer Daniele Gorret about the rhythm which, preceding meaning, disturbs its logical narrative linearity, and the documentation of an accident that took place during the rehearsal of a projection of Timeline photographic series by Jorge Molder on moving and fixed screens The accident, which in a completely fortuitous way synchronized in a rhythmical form the succession of the photographic series with an audiovisual disturbance, offers an opportunity to imagine a new way of “exhibiting” the relationship between ideas and materials exploiting chance, fortuitous accident and a fluid use of technology.